NZPS 2 (1) pp. 5–19 Intellect Limited 2014 Journal of New Zealand & Pacific Studies Volume 2 Number 1 © 2014 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/nzps.2.1.5_1 KIrsTeN MoANA THoMPsoN Victoria University of Wellington The construction of a myth: Bloody Mary, Aggie Grey and the optics of tourism ABsTrACT Keywords This article examines the discursive circulation of stories in journalism and travel Bloody Mary writing over the last fifty years that linked leading Western Samoan hotelier Aggie Aggie Grey Grey to South Pacific’s iconic Tonkinese, Bloody Mary. Made famous by Juanita tourism Hall in the Broadway musical (1949–1954), and subsequent cinematic adaptation Samoa (Joshua Logan, 1958), Bloody Mary first appeared in James Michener’s Pulitzer South Pacific Prize-winning Tales of the South Pacific (written 1944–1946, published 1947). James Michener The careful marketing and growth of the Aggie Grey brand both before and after her Rodgers and death in 1988, exemplifies the close economic relationship between the development Hammerstein of tourism in Samoa in the post-war years and the American film and celebrity industries, with the hotel in Apia providing accommodation, logistical and cater- ing support to Hollywood productions and film stars from William Holden to Marlon Brando. My examination of an origin myth linking a charismatic histori- cal figure with an iconic fictional character is undertaken not to ultimately suggest any one-to-one relationship between the two, but rather to demonstrate a remark- able persistence of a Pacific romanticism. In what I name as the optics of tourism I join with earlier scholars in suggesting that we must be more attuned to accounting for the affective power of visual media and the ways in which Hollywood plays a continuing complex role in cultural memory, tourism and popular culture. 5 NZPS_2.1_Thompson_5-19.indd 5 5/28/14 9:51:53 AM Kirsten Moana Thompson 1. The Broadway musical The life and career of Aggie Grey (1897–1988), the leading Western Samoan ran from 1949 to 1954, for 1,925 performances. hotelier, spanned multiple periods in Samoan history, from its time as a Bloody Mary appeared German colony through New Zealand administration, world war and inde- in the story ‘Fo’ Dollar’ pendence. In this time frame, Aggie Grey’s hotel business grew from a small along with Joe Cable and Liat, while Nellie boarding house known as the Cosmopolitan Club (1933) to a hamburger Forbush and Emile de stand and boarding house during World War II (1940–44). A leading post- Becque appeared in the war figure in Samoan tourism, Aggie Grey was honoured with the Queen’s story ‘Our Heroine’. Service Medal (1983) and was the subject of two biographies (Eustis 1979; Alailima 1988) and several stamps issued in her lifetime. The hotel that she would expand with her son Alan Grey in the post-war era (1945–present) is now an international company consisting of several resorts administered by her grandchildren, with business interests in other hotels and airlines, casi- nos in Western Samoa and Tahiti and, as this article went to press, globally rebranded as part of the Sheraton Hotels and Resorts chain. This article considers the discursive circulation of stories in journalism and travel writing over the last fifty years that linked Aggie Grey to South Pacific’s iconic, pidgin-speaking Tonkinese character, Bloody Mary. Made famous by Juanita Hall in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s blockbuster Broadway musical (1949) and subsequent cinematic adaptation (Joshua Logan, 1958), Bloody Mary first appeared in several stories which formed part of James Michener’s Tales of the South Pacific (written between 1944 and 1946 and published in 1947), which would go on to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1948.1 Different claims have been made about Aggie Grey being a partial source for Bloody Mary (Smyth 2000a; Horace Sutton 1966; Clarke 2005), both by travel journalists and by Michener himself, and, as I will discuss below, by the Aggie Grey Company’s own carefully negotiated strategies over the last fifty years (see Aggie Grey’s Hotel pamphlets and websites; Game 2001). The careful marketing and growth of the Aggie Grey brand, both before and after her death in 1988, exemplifies the close economic relationship between the development of tourism in Samoa in the post-war years and the American film and celebrity industries, with the hotel in Apia providing accommodation, logistical and catering support to Hollywood productions and film stars from William Holden to Raymond Burr, Robert Morley, Gary Cooper and Marlon Brando, who were working or returning to vacation in the Pacific. My examination of an origin myth linking a charismatic historical figure with an iconic fictional character is undertaken not to ultimately suggest any one-to-one relationship between the two, but rather to demonstrate a remarkable discursive persistence of what I term a Pacific romanticism, and what some scholars have called ‘Pacificist’ (Lyons 2006), ‘Pacific Orientalism’ (Landman and Ballard 2010) or even ‘complicit exoticism’ (Iwabuchi 1994). The persistence of this Pacific romanticism, with its roots in much older liter- ary and art historical traditions, in which the Pacific is represented as an idyllic physical and sexual mise-en-scène, and to which settler representational traditions from painting to photography and Hollywood cinema have long contributed, suggests some of the complex aesthetic interrelationships of the Pacific and the West. In what follows in my close examination of the histor- ical figure of Aggie Grey and, more particularly, in what I name the optics of tourism, I join with earlier scholars in urging that we be more attuned to the affective power of visual media and the ways in which Hollywood plays a powerful continuing role in cultural memory, tourism and popular culture (see Pearson 2005; Mallon 2012). 6 NZPS_2.1_Thompson_5-19.indd 6 5/30/14 11:37:45 AM The construction of a myth ‘eVeryoNe KNows THAT AGGIe Grey Is BLoody MAry’ So ran the headline in the Free Lance-Star that was later republished in the Washington Post (O’Loughlin 1977a: 7; O’Loughlin 1977b: 155). It exempli- fies the means by which the myth has persisted, assuming an a priori knowl- edge of the primary intertext, here South Pacific, the musical and film. Over 80 per cent of the more than sixty New Zealand, Australian, British and North American newspaper articles, published over the last fifty years and researched for this article, reproduced the myth while framing it as ‘legend has it’, or ‘she was widely believed to be’. The myth was recapitulated in her obituaries (sometimes along with her vehement denials) in the New Zealand Herald, Times, Guardian, The Advertiser and Los Angeles Times when she died in 1988 (see Kennedy 1988: 1; Anon 1988d: 1; Anon 1988a; Anon 1988b; Martin 1988; Anon 1988c). In 1984, while on a cruise, a similarly iconic figure in the representational history of American mediations on the Pacific, Dorothy Lamour, also contrib- uted to the myth. On her first visit to the Pacific, Lamour recalled, ‘[t]he ship’s captain asked me if I’d like to meet the original Bloody Mary from South Pacific. Her name is Aggie Gray [sic] and she runs a hotel in Samoa. He invited Aggie and the Queen of Samoa and two princesses to lunch, and we had a ball’ (Anon 1986: F4). According to the Grey family, and widely reported in New Zealand and US newspapers, the origins of the Bloody Mary story lay in American author Willard Price’s disgruntlement (see Ellis 2013b; Maguire 1976; Horace Sutton 1966). In an interview in 1976, Aggie said: No, I don’t believe I am the original of Bloody Mary. It all happened because of a disagreement with an American author called Willard Price. He came here to write about the islands and wanted to stay at the hotel, but he wanted special treatment – a separate little house away from the other guests, so he would not have to eat with them. I told him I didn’t have enough room. He was very angry. Later he wrote a book, ‘Adventures in Paradise’ [published in 1955]. (Maguire 1976: 58) Aggie is mentioned several times in Price’s book where she is described as the ‘boarding house keeper and prototype for Bloody Mary’, who inherits the ‘native house built for Gary Cooper in Return to Paradise’ (Price 1956: 237). In the Tahiti section, in a story about how Errol Flynn met his first wife Tiger Lil, Aggie Grey is yoked together with real hoteliers like Tia Bates from Peru, as well as fictional characters like Somerset Maugham’s notori- ous Sadie Thompson in the short story ‘Rain’: ‘Down yonder there is a char- acter called Tiger Lil who is as colourful as Tia Bates, Aggie Grey or Sadie Thompson’ (Price 1956: 30). Whilst Maugham’s ‘Rain’ is set in Pago Pago, Aggie lived in Apia, Western Samoa, but she once ran a bar called ‘Happy Hour’ in Pago Pago, from which she was purportedly deported in the early 1930s (Alailima 1988: 206). Characteristic of much of Price’s writing, and indeed that of other Euro-American writers of the pre- and post-war peri- ods, Adventures in Paradise recycles an older European literary romanticism in which real spaces in Samoa, Tahiti, Fiji and the Cook Islands were repeat- edly mapped onto western figures, including people like Paul Gauguin and Pierre Loti, Charles Nordhoff and James Hall, with whom they had literary and cultural associations. Indeed, the interchangeability of these fictional and 7 NZPS_2.1_Thompson_5-19.indd 7 5/28/14 9:51:53 AM Kirsten Moana Thompson 2.